hate bender
Like a bright bat-signal cast across the twitterverse into the clouds of my highly distractible and overcaffeinated brain, I am called to the blog-cave today by a piece of purported journalism - the cover story of this week’s NY Press slamming the good people of Stumptown Coffee. Many wise and appropriate things have been said in the comments section of the online article already, but I’ll cast my 2 cents into the fountain of this mini-rant…
Much like Twilight fans, coffeegeeks are notoriously easy to troll, and I guess I’m not immune. Take an ill-informed premise, add in some vague anti-hip faux-populism, air-headed economic theorizing, and a weird need to establish grudges against people you’ve not met… well, you’ve got yourself the makings of a runny turd of not-quite-journalism suitable for stirring up a fun pile of emails to your editor (who clearly ought to have better things to do, like fact-checking a cover story, but I digress).
In my last post I asked why coffeebars are so often singled out for special pseudo-scrutiny about their motivations, margins, and business practices. I’ll again resist a full accounting of the answer to that difficult question but one big element worth touching on is the discomfort many of our fellow citizens have with human authenticity in their retail transactions.
We are comfortable with the customer-is-always-right servile status quo of corporate retail. We are comfortable when the person at the cash register is on a lower rung of the unspoken but ubiquitous class divides which define our public behavior. We are often much less comfortable when the person on the other side of a transaction is a real person, a peer, or (heaven forbid) someone younger or more attractive or of otherwise enviable lifestyle. In America we are instructed that by nestling safely into our well-rehearsed role as “consumers” we can expect others to assume their complimentary facilitating and enabling roles, shielding us from having to engage with strangers as anything more than non-player-characters in the game of capitalism.
I would argue this customer / service-provider divide or lack thereof is the nut of what distinguishes good “indy” shops or owner-operated retail businesses from chains and corporate monoliths. It is the element that most reflects on that elusive and hard to approach notion of authenticity, which many folks, infantilized by consumer culture, aren’t always comfortable navigating.
I wont excuse bad service but I also don’t have much truck with the notion that our mere willingness to throw money around by itself entitles us to special treatment.
All of which is to say that the guy who wrote this article clearly has an issue with some people who work at Stumptown, or cool people generally, or people he perceives as trying to be cool, or people who are considered cool by other people who he has determined are themselves uncool. Insert obligatory mentions of bicycles, mustaches, and skinny jeans (I kid you not, read the article!). Maybe he tried unsuccessfully to date a Stumptown barista (editors note: never date baristas).
If I were a better wannabe culture critic myself I might go on further about the origins of consumer privilege, strategies for subverting retail expectations, or the ideal of service in a theoretical gift economy, but I put down the bong years ago and skipped the academic disciplines of college completely so y’all are on your own there.
And coming back briefly to the original article (which is amply refuted in the better comments), I would like to say that Duane and the crew at Stumptown march on the side of angels in this coffee game and deserve commendations for the inspiring work they do. The landscape of coffee company marketing and hype is littered with buzzwords and bluster and confusion still reigns in the press about what truly separates the greats from the merely goods or the totally phonies (a state of affairs us coffee folk still struggle to address effectively). An emerging pantheon of names (familiar enough to readers of this blog to not merit repeating) is finally getting well earned praise in certain circles. Foodies, good journalists and some great restauranteurs are starting to figure out coffee (even as most prominent Food Critics continue to ignore it or get it wrong). Things are looking up.
Now that the economy has gone to shit and ex-bankers are lining up to become bread bakers and baristas, big box stores are shuttering and being reborn as churches and community centers and farmers markets are flourishing, maybe we are ready as a culture to dispense with some of our old mass-market hang-ups. Have you hugged your hipster barista today?
Tags: coffee, new york city, NYC, stumptown, trolls
June 4th, 2009 at 12:45 pm
While I hear ya on the consumerism bent, I don’t think that’s what’s going on here.
Part of it is indeed just the blog-onomics. Blogs are the new “it” way of publishing text, and with democratization comes increased reach for imbeciles.
I think the bigger part is the culture-clash that accompanies the 3rd Wave coffee movement itself. Perhaps the postmodern-bohemian hipster-type culture was inherently destined to be the vehicle for this coffee paradigm, but the simple fact is that coffee is bigger than that. At the risk of sounding cheesy, coffee is bigger than all of us.
Stumptown is bringing a certain coffee aesthetic to NYC which is totally badass that’s for sure, but it brings more. Stumptown does have a certain image, and more specifically, whatever baggage that comes from anyone who’s been to or knows about Stumptown (through their shops or otherwise), and whatever the delta is between those individuals and their perception about Stumptown’s image. Some think it’s great. Some think it’s annoying and snobby.
All I’m sayin is, don’t be surprised. This sort of commentary is inevitable, and just the tip of the iceberg. The best thing that can happen to help offset this sort of thing is for more cultural diversity among top-quality coffee purveyors in general.
June 4th, 2009 at 12:58 pm
Somewhat repeating what a previous comment of mine on this subject…
I think there may be more going on here. Now the discussion is focused on the latest troll vs. the hype machine that started in the press on Stumptown. The original piece in the mag was nearly a shill, and focused as much (or more) on the person than on the coffee. Now, with the latest troll, the criticism of the original press is now caracatured in the form of the poorly researched troll article, and Stumptown is elevated (see–look at their critics–nothing but trolls!)–as is the Mag for now standing up for journalistic standards (pay no attention to the shill articles).
June 4th, 2009 at 2:00 pm
I think that it’s as simple as this– Consumerism.
If you think getting a product does anything for you for REAL, forget it.
It’s what you do.
The writer of the NY article is a fetishist, endlessly fascinated with the angles and contours of Stumptown’s brand, so he is missing something important.
The creation of Stumptown is still very much the work of this one guy, Duane, who is a coffee auteur of the highest order. He’s an artist.
In the future maybe Stumptown will be Starbucks, but now, it’s not.
Revel in this fact.
June 6th, 2009 at 1:47 am
I have to respectfully disagree with some of the other opinions here: it’s not about consumerism. At least directly. Even as much as a person driving a Hummer these days is clearly an advertisement for social Darwinism.
No, the essence of the NY Press’s beef is rooted in resentment — over a relentless pro bono publicity campaign from a self-selected “in-the-know” group of vocal advocates. The harmonic, uniform mantra from this echo chamber drives some to madness, and it’s a direct product of the modern era of communications. Remove the scale of what might superficially seem like lemming behavior — and that includes the many free weeklies as well as Nick’s aforementioned bloggers — and the effect is greatly diminished. Eliminate the uniformity of these who scream the loudest, and the effect also disappears.
Why isn’t it consumerism? Because the same principles apply even when the product is free. Case and point with Twitter: the degree to which it is clearly embraced and loved by a vocal mob is directly proportional to the degree it is derided, despised, and dismissed by others. (e.g., see: Nick’s Twitter post #1: http://twitter.com/nickcho/status/1225715861 … shortly followed by 180 more messages.)
If I were Duane, I would shrug it off. The premise isn’t even credible. And yet in the post I find a mixture of both amusement and a healthy release from claustrophobic, monolithic opinion when reading between the lines — in reading the writer’s non-verbal grunts of, “The next wannabe wonk who gushes over Stumptown to me: I’m going jihad on your ass.”
Our modern society makes us live in multiple bubble economies rooted in over-connected group-think opinion. Some of these bubbles are financial in nature. Other bubbles are made of so-called popular opinion. It’s healthy for these bubbles to give back a little once in a while — to avoid hyperinflation and the risk of mass implosion.
Although we could clearly argue that Duane suffered a very unfair take from the NY Press, this is a drop in the bucket compared the tidal wave of near-universal gushing praise he’s otherwise received. And perhaps a little undeservedly so on that latter point, given its extent and uniformity. Balance is a healthy thing — even if it must be achieved in the aggregate only through unfairly negative, and perhaps some unfairly rose-colored positive, individual characterizations along the way.
June 29th, 2009 at 1:51 pm
What is missing here is the realization and acceptance that the same easy capital that fueled the stock market, the housing boom, the McMansions, the Hummer, the War in Iraq, the farmers market, ther artisinal cheese shop and the super cool super sexy hipster coffee is all the same. Nope, Sorenson did not create a new paradigm. The tooth fairy doesn’t exist. Coffee is a commodity. I love the Stumptown mojo and want to be just like them but I’m old enough and experienced enough to know how the marketplace works to know that $20,000 espresso machines are not paid for by fairy dust. This is capitalism folks. Doesn’t mean I don’t like it. My 2 cents.
November 1st, 2009 at 5:58 pm
(editors note: never date baristas).
uh oh. But there is one that I wanna!
Why not?